Avatar Height In Second Life

[HarrisonMcKenzie]

SL scale drives me pretty crazy. I believe it comes from the amateur nature of SL. Frankly (but not offensively), few people on SL have any concept of proportion or scale. People make mutants that look like humans, but are 10 feet tall, have stumpy t-rex arms, and live in 100 foot tall castles.

It bothers me that I can't sit on most furniture properly without looking like I'm in a Jack and the Beanstalk play. It's bothers me when I rez out a table, only to see that it's taller than I am.

I understand the camera issues and why buildings in SL have to be a little wider and taller (I uploaded a life sized building once and it looked like a closet). But everything in SL is just so weirdly large.

[Penny Patton]

Oh wow, I log in to check out the new forum and this is the top post I see.

My views haven't changed since my 2011 post.If you own or rent land in SL then all of the rampant over-scaling is costing you money every time your tier/rent payment comes around. If you reduce an avatar/object/building in size by half, you've effectively made the land around it 4x larger. These days I have a cozy 4096sq.m. mainland parcel that I've been able to fill with more content than some full sim environments due in part to a deliberate use of scale.

On top of that, a consistent sense of scale is essential to immersion. Seeing a 9' tall "human" towering over orcs and minotaurs is a quick way to kill any immersion in an RP sim and the introduction of mesh has actually made mythical creature avatars less common as the 10/12/15 foot tall avatars stomping around today are totally incompatible with most of the furniture and animations out there in the sims such avatars used to be much more common in.

That said, most people are just in SL to have a little fun and don't care to fret about these issues, and that's fine. Be the size that's most comfortable for you, just maybe don't be so quick to get upset when you see an avatar that only comes up to your navel if your avatar is pushing 8 or 9 feet tall.

[Callum Meriman]

16 minutes ago, HarrisonMcKenzie said:

 Frankly (but not offensively), few people on SL have any concept of proportion or scale. People make mutants that look like humans, but are 10 feet tall, have stumpy t-rex arms, and live in 100 foot tall castles.

Shoulders set to 100, head size set to 0. 

 

(not sure how to edit HTML in this new forum - this is addressed to nobody in particular)

The actual math is simple for a well-proportioned avatar, especially if you use a pose stand to stay locked in place and rez/resize prims to measure these out.

For a 182cm Adult Male

• Height of the bald head: 22.8cm (0.228 on the Z of an edit window)
• Shoulder width: 45.5cm (0.455)
• Chin to shoulder: 7.6cm (0.076)
• Shoulder to navel: 37.7cm (0.377)
• Shoulder to crotch: 60.1cm (0.601)
• Crotch to knee: 45.5cm (0.455)

For a 178cm Adult Female

• Height of the bald head: 22.3cm
• Shoulder width: 44.5cm
• Chin to shoulder: 7.5cm
• Shoulder to Navel: 40.8cm
• Shoulder to crotch: 66.8cm
• Crotch to knee: 37.1cm

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

There are several blogs teaching realistic proportions.  The one I think of first is blog by Pussycat Catnap https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/getting-good-body-proportions-in-second-life/ .  And because she didn't link to it - Penny Patton also has tips on changing your camera angle to better suit the height of your avatar. http://pennycow.blogspot.com/2012/01/improving-sl-camera-short-version.html

Edited March 17, 2017 by Cinnamon Mistwood
spelling as usual

[IreeneAddler]

My SL friend and I want to be roughly the same height. I am female and he is, obviously, male. IF we both set our height sliders to 80, he is much taller than I am. Are the heights different for male and female avatars different too?

[Rhonda Huntress]

Hi, Ireene.

Height is determined by several things.  Body height is just one.  Torso and leg length also have a strong influence on over all height.  On top of that, hip, neck and even head sliders all have an impact.

And finally, yes, male avatars have a slight edge in tallest possible height.

[LittleMe Jewell]

4 hours ago, IreeneAddler said:

My SL friend and I want to be roughly the same height. I am female and he is, obviously, male.

I'm a tad confused on why your SL friend is "obviously" a male.  I have many male and female SL friends.

[Cindy Evanier]

1 hour ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I'm a tad confused on why your SL friend is "obviously" a male.  I have many male and female SL friends.

Ditto ?  Confused me too

[Rhonda Huntress]

11 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I'm a tad confused on why your SL friend is "obviously" a male.  I have many male and female SL friends.

 

10 hours ago, Cindy Evanier said:

Ditto ?  Confused me too

Because friend, obviously.  If it was partner she would be female.  Like mine, obviously. 

 

[Zzevir]

With 193 cm I don't know how avarige I'm. But I wanted to be higher then IRL. 

[Ceka Cianci]

30 minutes ago, Zzevir said:

With 193 cm I don't know how avarige I'm. But I wanted to be higher then IRL. 

If you go into appearance and then edit my shape..Once you are in the slider section where you can adjust things to your body..If you look in the upper right corner you will see a green highlighted word that say's either Feet or Meters..

You can see your height in feet or meters.. Not sure how accurate it is to RL though..

[Zzevir]

1 minute ago, Ceka Cianci said:

If you go into appearance and then edit my shape..Once you are in the slider section where you can adjust things to your body..If you look in the upper right corner you will see a green highlighted word that say's either Feet or Meters..

You can see your height in feet or meters.. Not sure how accurate it is to RL though..

Sorry I left out that my avatar is 193 cm IRL I'm a bit shorter then that. 

[Ceka Cianci]

5 minutes ago, Zzevir said:

Sorry I left out that my avatar is 193 cm IRL I'm a bit shorter then that. 

My mistake..I misunderstood and thought you were looking to see where you could find your SL height..

[IreeneAddler]

LittleMe Jewell and Cindy Evanier. I put 'obviously male' because I had just referred to him as "he" in my comment! He tends to mean male! ?

 

[IreeneAddler]

On 8/26/2018 at 5:01 PM, Cindy Evanier said:

Ditto ?  Confused me too

On 8/26/2018 at 3:56 PM, LittleMe Jewell said:

I'm a tad confused on why your SL friend is "obviously" a male.  I have many male and female SL friends.

Because I had just referred to him as "he" in my comment! 

[Akasha Sternberg]

in my starting days I have no idea how tall I was...

When I started to REALLY pay attention after my first break and when someone helped me with my looks I was always around 6´5" .

When I dipped my toe into modelling I HAD to create a 7ft version of that shape...

Back then I was within a realistic difference to the average male shape... which is ending up between their nipples and their chin with no or flat shoes. I was on the smaller medium side for female heights. Being an admin in a leading adult RP sim this height really helped with my authority towards the idiots you do get in those sims.  Plus I got all those compliments for choosing a sane height.

Then RL happened and I had to poof for years.

Now I feel like a friggin giant ever so often and people are quite fanatic about being your RL height or else you´re pretending, fake, you s**k and what not.... WHAT`S WRONG WITH EVERYBODY? Seriously?

I´m still around 6ft-ish although I´m 5´3.4" in RL (OMG) but then Akasha is 3 days older and weighs ....well not half but ...60-75% of what I do so even though she´s part of my personality she is kind of her own, right?

I have a RL version of my shape though with all the extra kilos and that, might even do the more thorough smaller version which will end a bit taller than me but a more average 2018-craze-SL female avatar medium height...when I can be bothered cos major shape editing can be quite the pain

 

[Magnek Fang]

I've had to yank up the height sliders on quite a few of my Kuroo-form avis (up to a point, the feet are not fitmesh so they start looking small once you're tall enough) out of fear of child avatar accusations (it's also a reason that I bought a chest for the Kemono). But these were ones with a more human face, thankfully people aren't nearly as inclined to assign a age to non-human avatars. Then again, I haven't wandered into a non-store Adult area recently.

[JasmineEdith02]

I've had a couple of different avatars since joining; both have been shorter than almost everyone else I've met in-world. It doesn't really matter too much to me -- it's often a conversation point, or something to joke about. Not especially short or tall in RL.